Online advertising that leverages semantic technology is expanding to the do-it-yourself model. Infolinks today is launching its self-service in-text advertising marketplace. The company says the service is designed to speed advertisers’ ability to create in-text ad campaigns, which work in the Infolinks method by revealing ads to consumers when they hover over a highlighted keyword in relevant content and opt in to see the spot on the advertiser’s landing page.

Infolinks already delivers in-text advertising campaigns across 250 billion pages of content in its network of pre-screened web sites that it says reach over 350 million unique visitors. The company says that network consists of more than 50,000 online publishers and blogging sites.

Its full page textual analysis “relies on natural language processing, machine learning and other proprietary linguistics technologies to ensure that ads are contextually relevant to the publisher’s content and what visitors are reading at any time,” says chief marketing officer Tomer Treves, as well as to avoid inappropriate brand associations.

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Vertical Search Works offers a semantic image-enabled marketing alternative to Google ads. According to a recent article, “If images improve click-through rates and help sell products and services, Vertical Search Works (VSW) may be onto something. The company offers marketers at Web publishers an alternative to Google paid-search ads, adding an image of the product being sold with a 140-character description, and a search box under the listing. The attached engine allows consumers to further the search through an on-site engine. The next phase of the product will ask the searcher questions. For example, someone searching on the word ‘egg’ on a recipe site might not initially include the word ‘scrambled’ or ‘poached.’ So the engine would ask questions such as whether they would also like ‘nutritional value’ or ‘restaurants locally’ or ‘receipts from local people.’” Read more